Sometime in the Neolithic
period, people came to live on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean
Sea. We don't know for sure where these people came from. It might be
West Asia, or it
might be Greece, or it might even be Egypt.

Up until the Middle Bronze Age, the Cretans (KREE-tans) were doing
about the same as the pre-Greek Lerna people on the mainland were doing.
But when the Indo-Europeans
invaded Greece about 2100 BC, they didn't
know how to sail boats, and so they never conquered Crete. The Cretans, also called the Minoans,
just kept on building up their civilization, making better and better
pottery and stone vases and houses.

By about 2000 BC, the Cretans were building big palaces
all over their island. These palaces had many small rooms around courtyards
that let in the light and gave them cool places to sit (Crete gets VERY
hot in the summer!). It seems likely that the Cretans got the money
to pay for their palaces by working as soldiers
for the Egyptians. Some Egyptian documents from around this time seem
to mention the Cretans.

In 1700 BC, a terrible earthquake shook the island of Crete. All
the palaces were destroyed. But the Cretans quickly rebuilt even bigger
and better palaces over the top of the old ones. The biggest of these
palaces is called Knossos (kuh-NOH-soss). Knossos has hundreds of rooms,
many of them brightly painted with pictures showing plants and animals
and people in fancy clothes dancing or talking. There are also some
nice things like bathtubs and toilets with running water (but only for
the queen and king).

The Cretans by now were so much stronger than their
Greek neighbors that they seem to have pretty much been able to tell
the Greeks what to do. Greek myths like the stories of Daedalus and Theseus
seem to suggest that the Cretans even took Greek people back to Crete
with them to be their slaves.

About 1620 BC a huge volcano erupted on the island
of Thera, near Crete. The town of Akrotiri, on Thera, was completely
buried by the mud of the volcano, and nobody could live there anymore.
Maybe the ashes from the volcano also were bad for Crete,
but they can't have been too bad, because the Cretans went right on
living in their palaces and stomping all over the Greeks and working
for the Egyptians.

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These palaces seem to have done very well until about
1450 BC, when all the palaces except Knossos were destroyed by fire.
Then about fifty years later, Knossos also was destroyed. This time,
none of the palaces were rebuilt, and Crete became a much poorer place.
We don't know who burned the palaces, but it seems likely that it was
the Greeks, who had finally gotten strong enough to dominate the Cretans
instead of being dominated by them.

Bibliography and further reading about the Minoans:

The
Archaeology of Minoan Crete, by Reynold Higgins and Rosemonde Nairac
(1973). Out of date, but Higgins is an expert on the Minoans, and this
book is specially for kids.The
Archaeology of Greece: An Introduction, by William Biers (revised
edition 1996) This is NOT a children's book, but Biers writes very clearly
and has a lot of good pictures. He does include Crete.Minoans:
Life in Bronze Age Crete, by Rodney Castleden (reprinted 1993).
Castleden may exaggerate the opium use and darker sacrificial tendencies
of the Minoans, but it's clear there was at least SOME opium use, and
his account is more balanced than some rosier ones.